freerange

Remarkable things will happen during Labour weekend at FESTA whether you’re a solo festival butterfly or more of a pack animal. There’s bound to be something to get your juices flowing (literally, don’t miss getting your sweat on in the Nomadic Sauna).

The annual Festival of Transitional Architecture is a free, public event that engages with the city of Christchurch (New Zealand) by exploring urban regeneration through large scale collaborative projects and urban interventions. It is the first and only festival of its kind in the world.

Over the course of Labour Weekend events, performances and projects happen across empty sites and in vacant buildings within the city’s four avenues, reintroducing life and urban activity to the centre. This rediscovery of the inner city invites a variety of collective investigations into the nature of civic life and opens it up to the community’s desire to participate in the remaking of their city. www.festa.org.nz

After the huge success of the inaugural FESTA last year, when 30,000 people swarmed to Luxcity, it’s great to know that Jessica Halliday returns as Director Extraordinaire, and with their stellar crew, FESTA is looking conspicuously like THE Festival to be at this year.

Chief Egg of the Freerange Pirate ship, Barnaby Bennett, is currently the Chair of the FESTA Board, and he’s been a relentless captain of advocacy and awesomeness for Christchurch. It’s not surprising then, that a fair few Freerange Captains couldn’t resist charting a course for the City Within A City.

Here’s a quick rundown of a few places to catch up with a Free Ranger at FESTA.

On Friday I’ll be hanging out in the Pallet Pavilion at Anissa Victoria’s Twilight Vintage Market from 4pm, from there you can pick up some of my new drawings if that kind of thing tickles your fancy. The Twilight Market will be stocked with interesting finds, good food, a bar, and live music, the perfect reason to wander through the blue fortress at dusk before things go crazy on Saturday.

Dusting off after Casual Friday, Barnaby Bennett will be hosting Urban T(act)ics, an open discussion with Chris Morley-Hall (founder of the Cuba Street Carnival), Federico Monsalve (Freerange director and design writer), James Coyle (architect/musician, Newtown Festival, Wellington), Lucinda Hartley (director and co-founder of Co-design, Melbourne), and myself. Urban T(act)ics will be a chance for “groups and individuals doing similar work in Christchurch to learn lessons from other cities and to meet people curious about what is happening here. All presenters work in organisations that have influence in their city but not as part of government, and will reflect on how their work can be considered an action, activity or tactic within the city.”

From there, Big Saturday gets huge, with the itchy anticipation of the main event, Canterbury Tales, building to a crescendo of surreal satisfaction. Clink your glasses, see you in the morning!

The Sunday Sesh warms up with an all ages drawing workshop I’ll be running called Supernova City. Inspired by dream cartographers of the city, the workshop will work collectively to make drawings and traces of the city as we experience it, blurring past memories and future dreams on the same massive canvas. We’ll be at the Pallet Pavilion from 10-2pm, I’ll be posting our progress up on Facebook and Twitter (@byronkinnaird and @FreerangePress), hashtag drawing, hashtag cant wait!

The first ever gathering in the flesh of the Freerange Directors seems almost too good to be true (and it might not be true), but we’ll be getting together to launch Freerange Vol.7: The Commons at 6pm at 88 Worcester Street, one of the Canterbury Tales sites. This issue is hugely relevant to Christchurch, so drop by to celebrate in Commons style with us.

There are seriously so many things to get involved in over the long weekend, check out the full programme, there’s bound to be something to do whether its learning about the Arches or the Pallet Pavillion, building a house, or meeting the puppets.

Congratulations to Geordie Shaw who is the winner of the competition to design a poster for the bird that Freerange is sponsoring for the NZ Bird of the Year Competition. Geordie wins a subscription to Freerange Journal and $50 of cold hard cash!

Things have been looking up and up for Freerange. We have now released 4 journals (with two more to come this year!), around 6 books, and have a functional and awesome website with 2 new articles a week appearing on it.

We have around 2000 people on our contact list, and around 2000 people a month visit the website.

We don’t really make any money, but do cover our costs and are about to give $2000 to Architecture for Humanity to do a project in Christchurch from the sales of Chur Chur: Stories from the Christchurch earthquake. We do have enough funds in stock to continue printing future copies of our Journal as they come out (and hopefully pay myself back soon for the original investment.)

The increased participation and consolidation of Freerange has been massively helped by the ongoing support of folk like Shakey Mo, and Gina Moss and more recently by Nick Sargent, Byron Kinnaird and Jacqui Moyes. Plus heaps of others that help edit, write, produce, consume the online and printed content.

All this makes me think it might be time to formalise the organisation of Freerange. So far it has legally just being me operating as a sole trader, and with the informal notion that this is a cooperative. I’d like to look into setting freerange up as a proper legal cooperative, which would share the ownership and the gains of ownership between us in some way. There are a number of different types of Cooperative, and it’d be great if any of you were interested in participating in working through how we might do it.

The one that jumps out initially is a kind of producer coop where we are join as creative producers (of text, images, design etc) and Freerange is a vehicle for us to spread, sell and disseminate our work to producers (and each other). i don’t think this would significantly change they way we operate now apart from:

Making the whole thing more inclusive and transparent,

Setting us up as a proper company (we can be a not-for-profit if we want)

We could use it to increase the subscription rates if we wanted by making that a mandatory act of being in the cooperative so we pay to join, but all get copies of the journal for that cost.

If we do this we can buy a .coop web address. How funny would freerange.coop be? Like a chicken coop!

Below is a copy and paste of an Official statement from the Occupy Wall Street Protest We at Freerange Press whole heartily endorse the messages below , the cause, and the enthusiastic use of their right to protest in public space.

Official Statement from Occupy Wall Street – this statement was voted on and approved by the general assembly of protesters at Liberty Square: Declaration of the Occupation of New York City

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.

They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.

They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.

They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.

They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless nonhuman animals, and actively hide these practices.

They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.

They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.

They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.

They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.

They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.

They have sold our privacy as a commodity.

They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.

They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.

They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.

They have donated large sums of money to politicians supposed to be regulating them.

They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.

They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantive profit.

They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.

They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.

They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.

They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.

They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.

They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts.*

To the people of the world,

We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

1. 5 days paid leave, (or bonus pay), for all Christchurch residents.

Its been a long hard year for people living in Christchurch: the city is physically damaged and the people emotionally drained from a year of shaking and uncertainty. Put simply, the people there need and deserve a good break. As the insurance industry delays and reconstruction and planning are pushed further back the city is also in desperate need of economic stimulus. I can’t think of a better time for a clever use of tax payer stimulus than now by giving ALL Christchurch residents 3-bonus days of public holiday to be used by the end of the year. An early Christmas present. People can take the chance to go for a drive, visit relatives, go out for nice meal, a bike ride, skiing. Whatever floats their boat. I haven’t costed it, but it couldn’t cost less than $10 millon and almost all the money would go directly into the Christchurch economy.

2. International Paintball Championships in the Redzone.

What are three of the main things Christchurch needs now?

Money to start rebuilding,

entertainment to keep people there sane, and

international exposure so people and capital return to the city.

In the spirit of this stunning and quite moving youtube video of skaters using the broken streetscapes of Christchurch, I propose that a large-scale reality tv Paint ball championships be run in Christchurch before it opens in 2012. Paint ball is water based so will dissolve in the rain. All the dangerous buildings have almost being demolished, the rest of the buildings to go are economic demolitions not structural ones so safety should’t be a concern. Perhaps we should take all the SAS and special forces forces out of Afghanistan and let them have a Special Olympic style battle to see which is best. Give them a building each and see who is left after 3 weeks?!

3. Eastern land swap

Eastern parts of Christchurch have been badly damaged by the earthquakes and large areas around the river of it are ‘redzoned’, meaning there are thousands of people who need to sell their houses to the government and move elsewhere. A great idea that I heard from Christchurch Architect, David Hill, is to swap some of the parks and golf courses in the east with this damaged land. Its a fantastic interventionist idea, but only works if the government gets active and onto it. The opportunity is there to create new neighbourhoods of well designed, well serviced, ‘green’ housing that enables people to live in, or close to the existing communities. While also getting some much needed stimulus into the economy and getting the trades and professions going. All it takes is some politicians with some vision… now where were they?

4. Bikes, Bikes, Bikes.

Not a particularly creative one, but this needs repeating again and again. Bikes are the cheap solution to lots of Christchurch’s future problems. Even with the advantage of a massive capital injection and a fresh start, the reality is that Christchurch is the wrong shape and layout to ever have a comprehensive public transport system. It can have a handy and modern bus system with clever and well designed tickets to make it easy to use, but is never going to have frequent trips to all parts of the city. It has grown around the expansiveness of the motorcar and will remain locked to its logic. Fortunately there is a much better way to get around flat wide cities with grid layouts than the car. Bikes! They are cheap, they last longer than cars, roads can fit thousands of them, its easier to park them, they keep people fit, they are cheap and choice! The rebuild is the perfect time to make the roads bike friendly and provide extensive bike infrastructure around the city. Cheap bikes to hire, bike paths on most roads, bike paths along the rivers, bike stands, places for workshops, safe storage, etc etc. Weather shouldn’t be a big problem, look at how they do it in Amsterdam and Copenhagen. 10% of one of the stupid holiday highways being built out of Auckland could fund this for decades. (The image below is Christchurch in 1937!)

5. Move the World Cup Cloud to Christchurch.

1 +1 should equal 2. Over the next 1-5 years Christchurch is going to be in desperate need of high quality temporary structures to house the civic and commercial activities of the city while the rebuild gains momentum. In about 30 days Auckland will be left with a large unused high quality government owned structure. Move it to Christchurch. Simple.

In anticipation of the upcoming third issue of the Freerange Journal, the Freerange team is happy to announce the release the first of two ‘tasters’. This is a small and lovely online taste of whats to come in the print edition later this year. It has three awesome articles and some very pretty pictures.

Our friends Spartacus R are putting the finishing touches on their 2nd album at the moment and are doing a little NZ tour. To celebrate they are offering up a nice 4 track download for free. Something old, something new, something borrowed and something purple. One new track of the up coming album, one old rare track from the 2007 Octophonic performance, and 2 new remix’s from guest artists of songs from their 2009 album When The Fever Takes Hold. Cluck on the picture below for some nice freeness.

Two freerangers, Barnaby and Byron (the two b’s!) have been announced as joint winners of a design research competition at Sydneys UTS. From the Australian Design Review website.

“The three winning projects are The Architecture Drawing Project, by Bryon Kinnaird and Barnaby Bennett from Victoria University Wellington – a project exploring the different modes of architectural drawing; (in)human habitat, by James Gardiner, RMIT (SIAL) PhD candidate – a proposal that looks at using the built environment to preserve ecological habitats; and CityBreeder, by David Pigram and Iain Maxwell, Canberra University and GSAPP Columbia/AA London graduates – a propsal that reshapes the urban design model as an open-source, real-time interactive platform capable of adaptive growth.”

After two succesful Volumes of Freerange Magazine (Vol.1 and Vol.2 for free download) we are now inviting people to submit ideas for the next volume. Freerange is changing its format slightly this year and will roll out 2-3 purely online smaller 20-30 page issues, which will culminate in a print version at the years end. Have a read of the starting text below and see where that leads you…The stories of our fore-bearers, our wise and brutal ancestors, tell us tales of events long before we laid our bare feet upon the earth. Folklore, mythology and religion reveal brilliant forces of light and dark, played out by a myriad of colourful characters.

There are a number of archetypal roles that link our own short lives to the activities of the gods, including that of the ‘trickster’. Many cultures have a central character that is an anthropomorphic animal or semi-divine demi-god, a mischievous rule breaker, artful swindler or independent outlaw. This character held an important purpose; to push accepted boundaries, to enter realms others were afraid of, to stir the waters, provoke thought and discussion, to speak truth to power.

The trickster is the court jester, the archetypal joker in the pack, the coyote, the neutral angel, the benevolent pirate. Although the trickster may cause collateral damage along their way, the change they create builds resilience and opens opportunities in the face of the inevitable pressures that this world inflicts.

But does the trickster exist today? If so, what roles do they play in modern societies? Are they the protesters, dissidents, radicals and revolutionists who challenge our systems of power, governments and ideologies? Or are they trouble-making drop outs who have nothing better to do but create societal discord? Can the trickster be found in the social entrepreneurs, the hopeful musicians, or urban artists? Maybe God is dead, but has capitalism now killed the trickster?

Submissions of interest are due on the last day of march. Thats the 31st.